Sentiers No.33

Lots of reading material this week as I did a bit of catching up and, as always, there’s a lot happening. Includes duplicitous Duplex, neo-colonialism, thoughtless AI, replicable cities, alchemy and hauntings, and minimal ethics for the anthropocene.

✕Duplicitous
About Google Duplex but it could easily have gone under The Churn.

What does this have to do with Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber or other tech companies? All these companies use technology and new business models to re-architect industry after industry, leaving a swathe of destruction in their wake. The new business models delight consumers, create eye-popping wealth for their shareholders and employees but often impose huge costs on society such as invasion of privacy, destruction of trust, net loss of middle-income jobs.

As it builds these labs, Facebook is adding to pressure on universities and nonprofit A.I. research operations, which are already struggling to retain professors and other employees. […]

“It is worrisome that they are eating the seed corn,” said Dan Weld, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. “If we lose all our faculty, it will be hard to keep preparing the next generation of researchers.”

Being classified as a gang member or related to a gang crime can result in additional criminal charges, heavier prison sentences, or inclusion in a civil gang injunction that restricts a person’s movements and ability to associate with other people. […]

“You’re making algorithms off a false narrative that’s been created for people — the gang documentation thing is the state defining people according to what they believe,” Harvey said. “When you plug this into the computer, every crime is gonna be gang-related.” […]

This new line of research suggests that Brantingham has not taken critiques of his research methodology to heart and is pressing forward with a project that is founded on incomplete data, dubious methods, and a premise that, if applied in the field, could result in more people of color behind bars.

✕Exclusive: How Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is rethinking Windows
Short interview with Nadella with some good points but also including it because of his thinking in general and the changes he’s been bringing to MS. He mentions that in the development of AI everyone should think about; privacy, security and cybersecurity, and what could be done vs what should be done.

Good AI is not just good technological frameworks but good ethical principles.

✕A Vision for Sidewalk Toronto
One of the better takes on this project. Shows how the focus of the company is on replicating the model, the idea of identity management and reduced friction, seamless vs seams, and how turning citizens into aggregated users is a scary proposition. Ends with some excellent recommendations for Waterfront Toronto.

Although I was shocked and offended by the question as a Canadian (how blindly-ambitious do you have to be as a private American company to even imply that our public voting systems are within your mandate?), it was not until after the interview that I realized I was not interviewing for a Sidewalk Toronto position. I was interviewing with Sidewalk Labs. I was talking to a company that aspired to export a complete platform for cities, and civics, using Toronto as an incubator. […]

In the case of Sidewalk Labs, an identity management system effectively creates an aggregated set of users that services can access if they are built on their platform. Except that new users are not consumers, but cities full of citizens who have no choice but to become users.

✕And for His Next Act, Ev Williams Will Fix the Internet
A bit like Williams has soured on social media, I’ve soured on Williams. I’m a fan of what he’s accomplished and, “philosophically” in agreement with his ideas. However, I did come to realize that none of his companies have made money (using the VC treadmill instead of tranquil growth) while he was leading them and, even considering the quote below, he still seems to not be taking seriously enough the perils of large scale platforms. More importantly, he often seems to forget the “little guy” in Medium’s multiple pivots.

Echoing Mr. Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress last month, Mr. Williams said he now believed that he had been too optimistic during social media’s early days, and had failed to appreciate the risks of putting such powerful tools in users’ hands with minimal oversight.

Listening to an architect of the fast-twitch internet extol the benefits of books and magazines is a little odd, like watching Chef Boyardee open a farm-to-table restaurant.

✕Alchemy & HauntingsAI researchers allege that machine learning is alchemy
Two AI researchers, Rahimi and Recht, making the case that various aspects of AI are so badly understood, even by engineers, that it amounts to alchemy. File the second quote below with “hubris” earlier in this issue. Also, I hate the expression “engineering is messy” which is used regularly to excuse roughly anything.

“I’m trying to draw a distinction between a machine learning system that’s a black box and an entire field that’s become a black box.” […]

++ Haunted MachinesNathalie Kane and Tobias Revell have been exploring areas of thinking around hauntings, magic, and alchemy for a few years now. Lucky then that they launched a new version of their website just in time for me to include with the above alchemy piece. You should spend a little while having a look a their projects, including some superb collaborators like Georgina Voss, Eleanor Saitta, and Ingrid Burrington.

✕We need a new way of seeing the Anthropocene
An interview with Joanna Zylinska about her books Minimal Ethics for the Anthropoceneand The End of Man, A Feminist Counterapocalypse. Her answers present some very good questions, directions for inquiry, and attaches (or at least builds from) the thinking of a number of other scholars, citing Adorno, Haraway, Mirzoeff, and authors like Atwood and Tsing. Honestly, I’ll have to re-read this and go digging about to better understand all of the connections. I encourage you to do the same.

We should first of all try and see the Anthropocene as a phenomenon and a discourse, that is, as problem posed to us humans that we have to respond to somehow. […]

The story I am proposing is non-normative because it doesn’t list any “approved” behaviours; instead, it “just” poses the question of responsibility – which, for me, is the most important question. […]

All those different disciplines enact something between science and poiesis, or maybe even discover a certain poeticity of science, especially at that kind of open-ended level, where science itself is actually akin to philosophy, and where it can also generate narratives about the world. The point at which science comes to a halt, that is the edge of our current knowledge and understanding, is the point where it has to construct concepts to name things that it observes or postulates through equations.

I designed a system in which employees need to work a minimum number of billable hours for us to break even as a firm. We call this the Break Even Point, or simply BEP. Employees set their own hourly rate with their clients. Of the extra billings hours above BEP, an employee receives half.” The other half is distributed between shareholders of the firm.

As China boosts overseas investment through its Belt and Road infrastructure program, it is increasingly dictating not just the terms of financing but also a broader set of technological applications. In doing so, it is altering the global competitive landscape by defining and exporting technical standards for everything from artificial intelligence to hydropower.